rapid bendings and the almost too easy gestures of her body; for she was
much given to action and to the expression of her thought by the motion of
her limbs. She might certainly have made her way as an actress, had
fortune called upon her to earn her bread in that fashion. And her voice
would have suited the stage. It was powerful when she called upon it for
power; but, at the same time, flexible and capable of much pretence at
feeling. She could bring it to a whisper that would almost melt your heart
with tenderness, as she had melted Sir Florian's, when she sat near to him
reading poetry; and then she could raise it to a pitch of indignant wrath
befitting a Lady Macbeth when her husband ventured to rebuke her. And her
ear was quite correct in modulating these tones. She knew--and it must
have been by instinct, for her culture in such matters was small--how to
use her voice so that neither its tenderness nor its wrath should be
misapplied. There were pieces in verse that she could read, things not
wondrously good in themselves, so that she would ravish you; and she would
so look at you as she did it that you would hardly dare either to avert
your eyes or to return her gaze. Sir Florian had not known whether to do
the one thing or the other, and had therefore seized her in his arms. Her
face was oval--somewhat longer than an oval--with little in it, perhaps
nothing in it, of that brilliancy of colour which we call complexion. And
yet the shades of her countenance were ever changing between the softest
and most transparent white and the richest, mellowest shades of brown. It
was only when she simulated anger--she was almost incapable of real anger
--that she would succeed in calling the thinnest streak of pink from her
heart, to show that there was blood running in her veins. Her hair, which
was nearly black, but in truth with more of softness and of lustre than
ever belong to hair that is really black, she wore bound tight round her
perfect forehead, with one long lovelock hanging over her shoulder. The
form of her head was so good that she could dare to carry it without a
chignon or any adventitious adjuncts from an artist's shop. Very bitter